Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Network security appliance provider WatchGuard Technologies (News - Alert) has unveiled its latest operating system, WatchGuard XCS Version 10, designed to power its e-mail and Web-based security appliance.

The WatchGuard XCS appliance is an e-mail security and content management appliance that delivers effective defense-in-depth for e-mail and Web services, including powerful data loss prevention. The solution provides protection from spam, viruses, compromised websites, blended threats, and network attacks.

According to Roger Klorese, director of product management at WatchGuard Technologies, the OS is designed to make deployment and management easier for IT security professionals, delivering new capabilities that can help address today’s challenges around virtualization and IPv6.

The new XCS 10 is characterized by IPv6 support for XCSv, as well as Microsoft (News - Alert) Hyper-V support. With the number of IPv6 enabled devices forecast to explode in the coming years, security researchers and attackers will focus more on discovering IPv6 vulnerabilities.  According to WatchGuard, strong vulnerability management processes will be critical to a successful IPv4 to IPv6 migration. Thanks to the appliance’s new IPv6 capabilities, organizations can apply the same rich security controls to their e-mail when migrating to IPv6 or mixed-addressing environments.

Another area of focus for XCS is BYOD and guest network access. To deal with the network access issues, WatchGuard XCS 10 now includes out-bound anti-spam controls to clean outbound e-mail and help preserve corporate reputation. With these capabilities, the company hopes to streamline the implementation and management of content security strategies for small, medium and large enterprises.

"Email and Web are two of the most commonly virtualized enterprise applications and the ability to protect them within the same cloud or virtualized environment gives our IT organizations increased flexibility and business continuity," said Jakob Roemer, technical manager at Montes A/S. "We can now leverage the best-of-breed security features in XCS – such as anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-phishing, anti-malware, data loss protection, email encryption and more – and align our content security policies across these virtualized platforms."